If ARC’s research agenda works, you’re less likely to live in a simulation.
ARC’s matching sampling principle says that if you understand the structure of a computation, you can estimate its properties mechanistically, i.e. without brute-force sampling. This weakens the case for living in a simulation: if our descendants want to estimate some quantity about the past — e.g. how cosmic resources would likely have been allocated between different values — they wouldn’t need to run many full-fidelity simulations of the world. They could instead estimate the quantity by reasoning directly about the world’s structure.
Interesting assertion. By conservation of expected evidence, it implies
If ARC’s research agenda fails (in a way that appears to be due to the intractability of the problem), you’re more likely to live in a simulation.
Do you endorse that assertion? I can kind of see the argument for it—if our descendants can’t estimate a quantity they care about by reasoning about the world’s structure, then they have to just run the simulations. That framing feels a lot bolder to me though.
If ARC’s research agenda works, you’re less likely to live in a simulation.
ARC’s matching sampling principle says that if you understand the structure of a computation, you can estimate its properties mechanistically, i.e. without brute-force sampling. This weakens the case for living in a simulation: if our descendants want to estimate some quantity about the past — e.g. how cosmic resources would likely have been allocated between different values — they wouldn’t need to run many full-fidelity simulations of the world. They could instead estimate the quantity by reasoning directly about the world’s structure.
Interesting assertion. By conservation of expected evidence, it implies
Do you endorse that assertion? I can kind of see the argument for it—if our descendants can’t estimate a quantity they care about by reasoning about the world’s structure, then they have to just run the simulations. That framing feels a lot bolder to me though.
Yes, I endorse the reverse update. But the update is smaller because I already expect ARC’s agenda to fail.